When did you first “encounter”Mattia Bonetti’s work? asks Lucia Van der Post in How to Spend It the Financial Times Sunday supplement. My first encounter with Mattia and at the time Elizabeth Garouste – the two were still working together and separated in 1990- was in 1985. Around that time Fashion Designer Christian Lacroix had commissioned the two designers to reinvent his Salon de Haute Couture in Paris. I was fascinated by the freedom of their baroque designs. Today Mattia has departed from black sculpted iron that characterized his first pieces produced by En Attendant des Barbares and first exhibited at the Galerie Neotu in Paris.